Kanye West Dons MAGA Cap for Pro Trump Speech on SNL

by Wes Messamore, published Oct 1, 2018

True to form, the eccentric and wildly popular rapper, Kanye West donned the MAGA cap again for his SNL performance over the weekend. "Ye" wore the hat for a performance of the song "Ghost Town," and followed up the song with a pro-Trump political speech for the studio audience after NBC's broadcast ended.

Democrats Weakening Black Families to Strengthen the Welfare State

West said: "Black man in America, supposed to keep what you’re feeling inside right now. All those Democrats. You know, it’s like the plan they did, uh, to take their fathers out the home and promote welfare. Does anybody know about that? That’s a Democratic plan."

This may have been a reference to the Cloward-Piven strategy advanced by two social justice proponents and professors of sociology at the Columbia University School of Social Work in 1966, to promote welfare enrollment to the point of overloading local and state welfare programs, precipitating a major fiscal crisis that would require federal intervention, and– as Profs Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven hoped– the establishment of nationwide universal basic income. The plan didn't target only poor blacks for welfare enrollment, but it did have many racial overtones.

In 2006 Dr. John McWhorter, a former Manhattan Institute Fellow, author of the New York Times Best Selling Book "Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America," and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the same university where Cloward and Piven taught their socialist revolutionary ideas, wrote critically in his book that the Cloward–Piven strategy "created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction."

"Try Love" (Not Partisan Division)

"You see they're laughing at me, they screamed at me," West also told audience on the SNL stage, referring to the rest of the SNL cast and crew, "They said, 'Don't go out there with that hat on.' They bullied me backstage. They bullied me! And then they say I'm in a sunken place. You want to see the sunken place? Okay, I'm going to listen to y'all now, or I'm going to put my Superman cape on. This means you can't tell me what to do... Follow your heart and stop following your mind. That's how we're controlled. That's how we're programmed. If you want the world to move forward, try love."

It is indeed a bold, and independent move for Kanye West, a black American, rapper, and entertainment business mogul to embrace the deeply polarizing presidency of Donald Trump.

Only 8 percent of black voters picked Trump while 89 percent picked Clinton according to CNN exit polls on election day, and the entertainment business is notorious for its entrenched far left politics and support for the Democratic Party.

But Kanye West, who was supportive of Barack Obama's administration, and has been seen on his wife, Kim Kardashian's Instagram taking selfies with Hillary Clinton, wants to be his own man when it comes to party and politics.

"Just as a musician, African-American, everyone around me tried to pick my candidate for me and then told me that I couldn't say that I like Trump," West told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel earlier this year.

West also took issue with the notion that "blacks can only be Democrats," a point of view that fellow Chicago musician Chance the Rapper repeated on Twitter this April.

Racism Not A Concern in America

Kanye continued:

"It's so many times that I talk to a white person about this. And they say, 'How could you support Trump? He's racist.' Well, if I was concerned about racism, I would have moved out of America a long time ago. We don't just make our decisions off of racism. I'ma break it down to you right now: If someone inspires me and I connect with them, I don't have to believe in all they policies."

Kanye West has apparently come a long way since his 2006 Red Cross telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims, in which he said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people," to the hilariously nonplussed reaction of a visibly uncomfortable Mike Myers.

About the Author

Wes Messamore

An entrepreneurship major and graduate of Belmont University, Wes believes that small business, innovation, and creative thinking are required to solve problems and improve our world. One of America's growing number of Independents, Wes has never registered with any political party, but describes himself as a libertarian (note the lower-case "L") and holds individual liberty as a key ingredient of good public policy.